C O M M E M O R At I

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C O M M E M O R AT I O N

William C. Stokoe and the Study of Signed Languages David F. Armstrong and Michael A. Karchmer

The right man in the right place at the right time.

This volume celebrates the work of William C. Stokoe, one of the most influential language scholars of the twentieth century. To understand his impact on both the educational fortunes of deaf people and on the science of language, it is necessary to consider briefly the status of these two related fields in the early 1950s. The almost universal educational goal for deaf people at this time was acquisition of spoken language and the ability to discern speech on the lips—other educational goals, including the acquisition of general knowledge, were arguably secondary to the development of “oral” skills. It was perhaps not coincidental that linguistic science had no interest in the gestural language of deaf people—language was synonymous with speech. This point is well captured in the title of one of the most influential books on linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, Edward Sapir’s Language:An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Sapir, writing in the 1920s, dismissed sign languages as substitution codes for spoken languages—speech was dominant (Sapir 1921: 21). The views of “experts” on deaf education in the mid-1950s may be best summed up by Helmer Myklebust, a product of Gallaudet’s graduate school.

This introduction is reprinted from The Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002).

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390 | Sign Language Studie s The manual language used by the deaf is an ideographic language . . . it is more pictorial, less symbolic. . . . Ideographic language systems, in comparison with verbal systems, lack precision, subtlety, and flexibility. It is likely that Man cannot achieve his ultimate potential through an Ideographic language. . . . The manual sign language must be viewed as inferior to the verbal as a language. (Myklebust 1957: 241–42)

It’s all here in this short passage: sign language is equated with the despised, non-alphabetic writing system of a non-Western people (the Chinese), it is said to lack the precision of speech, and it is stated, without any evidence, that deaf people will not achieve their full potential through its use. When Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet in 1955, he was entering an environment that was dominated by thinking like this. His achievements with respect to the value of signed languages were essentially fourfold. Stokoe’s first achievement was to realize that the signed language his students used among themselves had all the important characteristics common to spoken languages and that it had the same potential for human communication. His second achievement was to devise a descriptive system that would convince language scholars of these facts. This was what gave him the legitimacy to pursue his third achievement—convincing much of the general public and the educational establishment of the human and educational value of allowing deaf children to communicate in natural signed languages. His fourth grand achievement was then to apply what he had learned from the study of signed languages to the larger problems of the nature and evolution of the human capacity for language. In his introduction to this volume, I. King Jordan refers to Stokoe as being in the right place at the right time, and we will elaborate on that theme here. Before he arrived at Gallaudet, Stokoe, of course, had had little experience communicating with deaf people and no professional training in the education of deaf children. It is a matter of great interest to understand why Stokoe was able to see these things when the bulk of professionals trained in the relevant areas could not—if we come to even a partial answer to this question, we will have gained a bit of insight into the nature of human genius. With hindsight, it seems obvious that one of the things he had going for him was precisely his lack of training (or prejudice) in areas relevant to deafness.

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He also brought a first-rate mind (an inquiring mind) and training in the study of language generally (he had bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees in English from Cornell). The final ingredients seem to have been his persistence (some would say his obstinacy), his predisposition to question authority, and a well-developed sense of fairness or justice (see Maher 1986, for a discussion of his childhood, his education, and his first years at Gallaudet). For someone with an open and inquiring mind, and an interest in language and communication, there can be few more stimulating environments than that provided by Gallaudet. Here deaf people communicate among themselves and with hearing people using a great variety of communication systems and codes that we can now recognize, thanks to Stokoe, as ranging from natural signed languages (mainly ASL), to what look like languages of contact between ASL and English, to invented sign codes syntactically modeled on English. During the course of an average day, members of the Gallaudet community are likely to have to negotiate a number of communication situations involving a number of these systems and codes. In this environment, one develops a heightened sense of the range of possible forms that languages can take and a sensitivity to the differences among them. We have established already that Stokoe was the right person, and now we have located him in the right place. What about the time? Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet just as the civil rights movement was beginning to challenge the traditional caste structure of the United States. As this movement matured during the 1960s, an idea became firmly entrenched in the United States that individuals should not be deprived of legal, civil, educational, or economic rights because of their membership in any particular ethnic, religious, or linguistic group. Ultimately, this idea was extended to include people with physical disabilities. It cannot be completely coincidental that the nascent movement that Stokoe helped to launch came ultimately to be seen as a civil rights movement in its own right.

What He Did So what was it exactly that he did? He is often described as having “discovered” ASL or as having “proved” that ASL is a language. A good

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deal of mythology seems to have sprung up around this question, and we think that, to some extent, Stokoe felt about it the way Columbus should have felt when he was described as having “discovered” America. Just as American Indians had known about the Americas for more than 10,000 years before Columbus arrived, so deaf people had been aware of the “languageness” of their signing and of the benefits that it conferred long before Stokoe came on the scene. They were also “proving” that it was a real language on a daily basis by using it to perform all of the functions that languages usually perform. But just as Columbus had done with respect to the scope of the physical world, Stokoe’s accomplishment was to reveal these facts to a larger, skeptical public; and, in doing so, he made a “Columbian” addition to our knowledge of the linguistic world and to our understanding of the human condition. One aspect of Stokoe’s genius was to recognize that it would not be good enough simply to announce the “good news” that sign language was really a language—he would need to show it using the tools of the science of language, the tools of descriptive linguistics. Linguistic science in the mid-1950s was just about to be turned on its head by a young scholar named Noam Chomsky. He launched an intellectual revolution following which language came to be seen more as a cognitive than as a social phenomenon, but that revolution need not concern us here. Stokoe was mainly influenced by an older anthropological linguistics that had as its most urgent goal describing exotic languages that were facing extinction. Anthropological linguists, and anthropologists in general for that matter, had for a half century been trying to overcome Western prejudices that had depicted non-Western languages as somehow inferior to those of Europe. These scholars had developed an armamentarium that could be used to describe any spoken language and commit it to paper. They had come to realize that all languages have regular structures at a level below that of the individual word—according to the terminology of linguistics, they have sublexical or phonological structure. This structure is based upon systems of contrast—differences in meaning must be based upon perceptible differences in language sounds, as in bat and hat. It is this sublexical structure that makes phonetic writing possible, and all spoken languages have it. Stokoe’s masterstroke was

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to show that ASL has such a structure and that it too can be written in a phonetic-like script (Stokoe 1960; Stokoe, Croneberg, and Casterline 1965). By devising a workable script, he was able to convince other language scholars that ASL employs such a system of linguistic contrast, that it has a regular internal structure, and that is, therefore, not simply ad-hoc pantomime or a corrupt visual code for English. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to describe Stokoe’s system (see Armstrong 1999, for a description of the system and a discussion of its historical importance), but it is worth noting that it has held up well, despite numerous attempts to improve upon it, and is still used to transcribe signed languages. Stokoe, along with two deaf colleagues, Carl Croneberg and Dorothy Casterline, used this notation system to compile the first comprehensive dictionary of ASL in 1965. Having completed this initial descriptive work, Stokoe then set about convincing the larger world of the linguistic qualities of ASL, he took these ideas “on the road” so to speak. At Gallaudet, he put in place several operations that would further bolster the legitimacy of ASL and other signed languages. First, he set up the Linguistic Research Laboratory in 1971 and invited people in from around the world to work on problems in the description and interpretation of signed languages. This provided an institutional home for signed language research. Second, in 1972, he founded the journal Sign Language Studies to provide an outlet for publication of increasingly complex and sophisticated scholarly articles on linguistic and other aspects of the signed languages of deaf people. This was at a time when mainstream linguistics journals showed little interest in publishing work from this incipient field. Stokoe owned, edited, and published this journal himself for more than twenty years, and the journal chronicles the growth and maturation of the fields of signed language research and deaf studies. It is now owned and operated by Gallaudet University Press. During the early 1970s, Stokoe began to see that his work on ASL might have a larger significance, beyond the development of increasingly complex linguistic studies and the support these were providing for the reform of deaf education. At this time, Stokoe became interested in the newly reinvigorated scientific study of the origin and evolution of the human capacity for language. Because this topic had been

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the subject of rampant and undisciplined speculation around the turn of the twentieth century, it had fallen out of favor with linguists and anthropologists. Stokoe joined a small group of scholars, including Gordon Hewes, Charles Hockett, Roger Wescott, Stevan Harnad, and Horst Steklis, who began to synthesize new information from paleontology, primatology, neuroscience, linguistics, and, significantly, sign language studies into more coherent scenarios for the evolution of language (see Harnad, Steklis, and Lancaster 1976). During the past quarter century, these scenarios have grown more sophisticated and plausible, due in large part to Stokoe’s efforts. Stokoe concerned himself especially with evolutionary problems that might be solved by postulating a signing stage in human evolution. He participated in several important symposia on this topic, one of which resulted in the book Language Origins (Wescott 1974). In order to get this book into print, Stokoe established a small publishing company, Linstok1 Press, which also took over publication of the journal Sign Language Studies. Stokoe came to believe that iconic manual gesture must have played a key role in the transition from non-human primate communication to human language. In making this assertion, he was rediscovering a line of thinking that went back at least to the Abbé de Condillac, an influential figure in the French enlightenment of the eighteenth century. According to this line of thinking, the introduction of iconic manual gesture might solve the problem of attribution of meaning to arbitrary vocal signals—iconic gestures which resemble the things they refer to might form a bridge to the symbolic relationship of speech sounds to their referents. This might occur if iconic gestures became paired with non-iconic sounds in reference to objects and events in the environment. But Stokoe went a step beyond this to suggest that iconic manual gestures might also have been involved in the thornier question of how syntax might have originated. This goes to the question at the heart of Chomskyan linguistics which posits syntax as the defining characteristic of human languages—how do languages come to refer not only 1. It is worth noting for posterity that the name “Linstok” was a play on the words “linguistics,” “Stokoe,” and “linstock,” the last referring to a device used to hold a match for firing a cannon.

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to objects and events, but to the infinite number of possible relationships among them? Although Stokoe was no fan of Chomskyan linguistics, there is an interesting parallel between his later thinking and that of Chomsky. We alluded above to the increasing complexity of the linguistics of signed languages. Stokoe began to see in this an unnecessary and ultimately unproductive obscurantism. In response to this trend, he published in 1991, an extraordinarily original article entitled “Semantic Phonology.” At the same time, Chomsky was moving in the direction of a “minimalist program” for generative linguistics (Chomsky 1995). According to this program, the number of essential linguistic parameters could be reduced to two: a logical form and a phonetic form. Stokoe proposed that all of the multilayered complexity that had been introduced in linguistic descriptions of signed languages could also be reduced to two parameters: something acting (in the case of manual gesture, a hand) and its action. Stokoe pointed out, moreover, that this acting unit had the essential characteristics of one of Chomsky’s elementary sentences, a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. The final link in his chain of reasoning is that use of such iconic manual gestures by early humans might have led to analysis of the agent/action relationship that is inherent to them, leading ultimately to the elaboration of syntax and, hence, language. His views on these and many other issues are summed up in his final major work, a book entitled Language in Hand, published posthumously by Gallaudet University Press (Stokoe 2001; and see Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox 1995).

This Volume This volume contains papers that were presented at the Gallaudet conference honoring Bill Stokoe’s eightieth birthday. It is important to emphasize that the fall 1999 conference and this volume originally were planned as a living tribute, not as a memorial to mark his passing. Indeed, Stokoe was very much present at the conference—sitting with family and friends close to the presenters and drinking in every word and sign. In the months that followed, despite rapidly deteriorating health, Stokoe’s spirits were buoyed in discussions of the issues raised by each of the presenters. Sadly, the time left to him was all too

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brief and Bill Stokoe died on April 4, 2000, a few months short of his eighty-first birthday. It was the intention of the conference’s organizers to engage leading scholars in the many scholarly disciplines that his work had influenced, and the wide range of his ideas is represented here. The volume is divided into three major topical sections, bracketed by introductory and closing papers by I. King Jordan and Carol Padden. The sections have to do with the historical context of Stokoe’s work, the issue of language origins, and the diverse populations, deaf and hearing, that have benefited from the work he began. Each section is preceded by a brief introduction, and we leave discussion of the individual papers to authors of those introductions. However, we point out that Stokoe’s impact is at least partly revealed by the range of time during which the scholars represented in this book have known him and been influenced by him. The range is wide indeed, from deaf scholars such as Jordan and Padden who had known and worked with Stokoe for thirty years or more, to Frank Wilson, author of the widely acclaimed book, The Hand, who had known of Stokoe and his work for only a few years before Stokoe’s death. The point, of course, is that the work that Wilson drew on in his book was done during the 1990s, when Stokoe was already in his seventies. It is a measure of his full achievement, that he was still doing fresh and original intellectual work forty years after he began. One final note—the authors of many of the papers were Stokoe’s close personal friends, as well as his professional colleagues, and many were aware that they were probably seeing him for the last time at the conference in October, 1999 where the papers were first presented. For this reason, some of the papers present scholarly findings with a personal tone. It was the judgment of the editors, in several cases, that it would be appropriate to retain these personal references in final print form. It is in that spirit that we close this section in the way that Bill Stokoe ended each of his e-mails. It is the way that ham radio operators signal “over and out.” Here’s to you, Bill—“73.”

References Armstrong, David F. 1999. Original signs: Gesture, sign, and the sources of language. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

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Commemoration/Study of Signed Languages | 397 Armstrong, David F., William C. Stokoe, and Sherman E. Wilcox. 1995. Gesture and the nature of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harnad, Stevan R., Horst D. Steklis, and Jane Lancaster. 1976. Origins and evolution of language and speech. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Maher, Jane. 1996. Seeing language in signs.The work of William C. Stokoe. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. Myklebust, Helmer. 1957. The psychology of deafness. New York: Grune and Stratton. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language:An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Stokoe, William C. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics: Occasional Papers, 8. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Buffalo Department of Anthropology and Linguistics. ———. 1991. “Semantic phonology.” Sign Language Studies 71: 107–14. ———. 2001. Language in hand:Why sign came before speech. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. Stokoe, William C., Dorothy Casterline, and Carl G. Croneberg. 1965. A dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press. Westcott, Roger. 1974. Language origins. Silver Spring, Md.: Linstok Press. Wilson, Frank. 1997.The hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture. New York: Pantheon.